


Legacy

by busaikko



Series: Autumn Stories [30]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Community: scarvesnhats, M/M, Marauders
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-10-23
Updated: 2005-10-23
Packaged: 2017-12-13 10:42:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,156
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/823399
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/busaikko/pseuds/busaikko
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Greyback specialises in children… bite them young, he says, and raise them away from their parents…” (Half-Blood Prince, p. 314)  20 years later.  Like father, like daughter.  Her father has always understood what her mother cannot.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Legacy

She walks up to the door four times before she is able to knock; she knocks too hard, too loudly, and wants to run. It takes too long before she hears footsteps. Everything is too much.

The door opens and yellow light spills out. It makes her smile despite it all to see her father holding the hurricane lantern high. How many times have they told him to give in and have electricity installed? She’s offered to do it herself, but he always just shakes his head and looks amused.

He steps aside and she goes into the house. It is familiar enough that she can walk the corridor in the darkness, and she precedes him into his comfortable den. The chairs there were long-ago battered into shapelessness—she and her siblings did that, over the years. Her mother was glad for the chance to give them away and buy stylish new things to match her stylish new life. Her father chose to keep them. That is why, on running out of her mother’s house, she has come here. To lick her wounds.

Her father is smoking, and she is dying for a fag. She knows that he sees her eyes following his hand, the way she tries to breathe in the smoke before it can be dissipated on the cold wind that blows through the house. He takes up the pack from the desk and tosses it to her.

“Can we just assume I’ve lectured you about bad habits?” he says, and fumbles a plastic lighter from the desk drawer. She catches it as well.

“Mum knows I get them from you.” She lights up, and the flare from the lighter momentarily blinds her. She can’t sit down, so she goes over to the veranda windows that he never shuts. The view of the rolling hills and ocean is gorgeous; or it would be gorgeous, if it weren’t the middle of the night. She sighs out smoke. “We had a row.”

“Again?” He comes and stands, not quite next to her, but near enough that he can see the side of her face. “All those years you never gave us any trouble, and now—“ He rolls his hand in the so-on-and-so-forth gesture, raising one eyebrow.

His imitation of her mother is spot-on, but not malicious: didn’t her mother always laugh when he took the wind out of her sails? He is still best friends with her, she thinks, despite their going separate ways. They had only stayed together for the children, in the end, and by the time the last ones had been safely seen off to school it had come as a relief to all concerned when her father packed his suitcases and left.

“All those years,” she echoes, and her mouth twists out of her control. “All these years. I am,” she says, and stops. She had gotten this far with her mother before the conversation had gone wrong. She thinks it might have been a mistake to wear the twin-set. She thinks of all the mistakes she’s made this far in her life, and the ones she wants to avoid. “I don’t live alone,” she says, toes in the water.

“Good,” her father says, “you’re twenty-five, you _should_ live with someone.” She knew he understood in that way that her mother, hard though she tried, would never.

“Her name,” she says carefully, “is Michelle.” She looks out at the non-view intently. She has schooled herself to be able to say _Michelle_ without automatically smiling, but her eyes give her away.

“Michelle,” her father says, and she can hear the smile in his voice, “is a lovely name.” There is a warm hand on her shoulder, and it is all she can do not to fall into that embrace.

“I love her, Dad,” she blurts out, and there it is, her heart offered up and secrets bared. The hand on her shoulder squeezes gently.

“If she loves you back, then you don’t need to be crying, do you?” he says gently, and then she is bawling in his arms, her cigarette removed deftly as he lets her sob it all out. When she hiccups to a stop, he hands her his handkerchief, smelling of smoke and cedar chips. He pushes her into one end of the squashed sofa, and takes a bottle of whiskey from the lower desk drawer.

“Ice?” he asks, but she waves the offer away. She takes her whiskey neat, just as he does.

“Your mother’s right, you really do get all your bad habits from me,” he says, handing her her glass. “Does she know?” When her mother asked that (along with _is she one of us?_ ) she had said something stupid and not remotely relevant, something about _trust_ and _not a child anymore_. This had led her mother, with her politician’s mind, to home in on the blood in the water.

“Yes,” she says now. “And she’s a Muggle. Like me.”

Her father nods, takes a sip and grimaces. “If she knows and she loves you, you’re blessed, you know that?” She nods; she knows what it feels like to be blessed. She is blessed with loving parents who took her in when she had been abandoned; she is blessed with loving siblings, all twelve of them, the two who are normal and the others who are cursed. Like her.

Like her father.

She looks at him now and feels an irrational anger towards her mother on his behalf.

“Mum wouldn’t hear it,” she says now. “She wouldn’t _listen_ to me. She said I’d come to my senses. She said I didn’t need to, to take on more _problems_. She wants—what she wants is not my future.” She takes a cautious swallow, and the alcohol burns all the way down to her stomach. “She’s so brilliant about everything else,” she says, and she can hear her own sixteen year old self whining down through the years. “She supports every mad project we come up with, she’s always been behind us all the way. She’s fought for us without tiring for twenty years now. I’ve never—she’s never been so _against_ something, you’ve no idea. She made me feel… if she thinks it’s so wrong… that it must be.” She blinks up at her father now, watching him piece together her fragments of incoherence.

“I imagine it came as a surprise to her, and not the sort that she takes well,” he says slowly. “You know how she feels about what you pick up from me.”

This is so tangential to the conversation that she has to stop and replay his words, turn them upside-down and shake them to see if hidden meanings fall out. Her father watches her, always one step ahead and always terribly amused. He crosses to the bookshelf and takes down a leather-bound album. He hands it to her.

“I married your mother when I was nearly forty years old,” he says, leaning back against the desk, arms crossed. “Just a little younger than she is now. I married her following the death of the man I had been… involved with since I was a teenager.”

She is stunned and opens the album at random. There is her father, grinning cheekily across the impossible irretrievable distance of time. The picture is a little faded and slightly wrinkled. As she watches he pulls another man halfway into the picture. She catches a glimpse of thick dark hair, of high cheekbones and a wide smiling mouth before he ducks back out of sight.

“That’s him?” she asks, and for a moment she feels what her mother surely felt: anger that he had _no right_ to suddenly become this unknown person he’s been all along. Knowing her father, that is his intent. She flips through the pictures quickly. There are no captured kisses or caresses. The only picture in which they are touching is that first one. Most of the pictures are of the other man, alone. She says so; her father shrugs.

“No one knew,” he says simply. “When we were young he didn’t want to tell anyone. Then he was… in prison, wrongly, for twelve years. And then we had, what, a year—not even—before he was killed.”

“Uncle Sirius,” she says, and her father flinches, barely enough for her to spot. She’s overheard enough comments and stories over the years to know about her mother’s disreputable uncle. But he doesn’t look mad in the pictures. The weight of her father’s trust in her is almost dizzying.

 _No one knew_ is frightening in its implied isolation and deceit and fear; but _no one knows still_ was devastating.

“Sirius,” her father agrees. The way he says the name is not the same way he says her mother’s name. It is not funny and friendly and comfortable; it has echoes of regret and bitterness; unless she has had too much to drink and is reading too much into those short syllables.

“Tell me,” she says, deciding that if she is going to be drunk she might as well be nosy. He father looks at her, then comes to sit next to her on the sofa. He takes the album from her and talks; by the time he has told his story, and she hers, the sky is already lightening. Her head rests on his shoulder, and she watches his hands, crooked and strong and gentle.

“Mum knows?” she asks fuzzily.

“Of course. She wasn’t happy, but.” He gestures to describe acceptance, or resignation. “It doesn’t come up. Except under these circumstances. You are not,” he says, ruffling her hair, “the first.”

“Oh,” she says; “ _Oh_.” Her fingers tap across her knee as she thinks. “Who?”

He snorts and raps her on the head.

“Right. Sorry,” she says. If there is one thing her family knows besides how blessed they are to have each other, it is how to keep secrets. And now she has her father’s other secret to keep, and the landscape of her childhood is shifting, reforming, as it accommodates and confirms that which was only half-sensed before. It is overwhelming. She yawns, hugely. She can’t help it.

“Do you want to kip in the spare room?” he asks.

“No. I’ll go home. Are the trains running yet?”

He glances at the clock. “Soon enough. I’ll make coffee.”

In the kitchen she can see the sun rising red over the ocean. The coffee fills her with warmth. She hadn’t realised how cold she had been. Her father, as always, is barefoot with his sleeves carelessly rolled up. She is still wearing her coat. His imperviousness to cold is another thing that always frustrated her mother, who insisted that her father was simply being masochistic. But, she thinks, hands curled around her chipped mug, he doesn’t enjoy the cold, he enjoys denying it, refusing to let it control him.

Her father brings out a package of digestive biscuits. She takes two and resists the urge to poke around his pantry. Her mother certainly would, and would sigh and buy him groceries. Her mother, she sometimes thinks, treats him like a particularly recalcitrant child. Her mother has her career and her pretty house and her exciting friends and her beaux. She wonders if her mother feels guilty; she thinks she needn’t.

He walks her down to the station, their shadows long along the road.

“Are you happy?” she asks. “Have you _been_ happy, all these years?”

“Of course,” he says, and he tugs on her arm, making her stop and listen. “Never think for a minute that I don’t love you, or your mother, or any of your brothers and sisters, wretched reprobates that they are. I am honoured and privileged to have you all.” He starts walking again. His arm is around her shoulders.

“If you could have him back,” she says, curiosity moving independent of reason; and then the impertinence of it makes her cringe. She knows that she is too young to understand the complexities of love: she only really knows her parents and her siblings, and even then through a glass darkly. Her father has seen two wars, has lost friends and a lover, has raised thirteen children, has become a respected authority in his field, has never once raised his voice or his hand to his children, has never cried, has taught her to bear difficulties and prejudice with dignity and love.

Her father smiles wryly. “I’d go up like a brushfire,” he says. “Here we are then.”

He has his wallet out and runs a train card through the wicket for her. She goes through, collecting the card, and then turns.

“Thank you,” she says.

“Take care,” he says. “Give my best to Michelle. And call your mother. She’ll have come around by now.” He raises one hand, then turns and heads back down the road, into the rising sun.


End file.
